Racial capitalism is and was not inevitable. At every point in US history, the exploited and dispossessed rebelled for an alternative future. In No More Peace, Oliver Baker highlights how numerous insurrections, revolts, and armed campaigns of enslaved and colonized people advanced abolition war as the movement to win collective life over class society in North America. From this aim, abolition war became the motor force for constant white counterrevolution. This puts America's history of class struggles in a revealing new light. Through historical analysis, literary critique, and theory, Baker shows how Black and Indigenous rebels developed insights about counterrevolution precisely through their militant confrontation with it. Unearthing these critical insights, Baker shows how US capitalism was reproduced and expanded through the long history of white counterrevolution. Whiteness and settler colonialism developed as anti-Black and anti-Indigenous alliances formed across class difference to organize people to police or soldier for capitalism. In No More Peace, we relive moments of radical abolition and anticolonialism—particularly those of Nat Turner, Harriet Tubman, John Brown, and the Seminoles—that also ruptured counterrevolution. Slavery and settler colonialism were always uncertain projects—vulnerable to defeat, collapse, and ruin by those who resisted. Racial capitalism was always contingent.
Oliver Baker is Assistant Professor of English and African American Studies at Pennsylvania State University.
"Oliver Baker puts the long abolition war at the center of this inciting and insightful study. Black, Indigenous, and anticolonial revolutionaries—the primary theoreticians of change in the settler colony called the United States—take their proper place in No More Peace. Baker makes clear why it is important to get this history right and underscores what was, and is, possible and necessary for peace and justice on stolen land, especially in these times of terrible danger."—Nick Estes, author of Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance
"No More Peace places class struggle at the heart of the analysis of racial capitalism and settler colonialism, where it belongs, clarifying the nature and the stakes of the organic drive of communist struggle in these lands, toward the achievement of Black freedom and the extension of Native sovereignty."—Manu Karuka, author of Empire's Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad
"Innovative in its approach to abolition, anticolonialism, and capitalism, No More Peace gives readers a history of how white counterrevolution across class differences protected violent institutions, such as slavery and settler colonialism. Baker rediscovers the important history of nineteenth-century abolition movements, not as civil rights movements, but as emerging from revolutionary anti-capitalist struggles in North America that have not been recognized in scholarship to this day."—Bernadine Marie Hernández, author of Border Bodies: Racialized Sexuality, Sexual Capital, and Violence in the Nineteenth-Century Borderlands
"We are at war, and we have been for quite some time: against settler colonialism, slavery, and their persistent legacies. Baker understands the stakes of this war better than most. In No More Peace, he bridges the oft-overstated gap between abolition and anticolonial resistance, poring over the battlefield maps of the past to provide crucial reconnaissance for the struggles looming on the horizon."—Geo Maher, author of Anticolonial Eruptions and coordinator of the W.E.B. Du Bois Movement School for Abolition and Reconstruction
346 pp.6 x 9Illus: 15 b/w images
9780520401846$29.95|£25.00Paper
Feb 2025